The Body of a River, The Body of a Human

The magical Esknamucky Waterfall. Photograph by Nigel Wheal

A river is never still, even in its seeming quiet. Beneath its skin lies a pulse — the swirl of silt and current, the gathering of tributaries, the slow carving of stone. To stand beside a river is to stand beside a living being, not a backdrop or a line on a map, but kin.

For centuries, our ancestors understood this. In Ireland and across the world, rivers were honoured as deities, guardians, teachers. They were not resources but presences. They had mouths, shoulders, bellies, and bones. They dreamed, remembered, demanded respect. To kneel beside a well or ford a stream was not to cross matter but to meet a body. And when we look inward, we know this is true — for we ourselves are bodies of water, held together by a fragile skin.

Science tells us that we are more water than anything else. Over half of our weight is fluid. Our blood is salt like the sea. Our tears rise like tributaries, our heart beats like a drum inside a cavern of water. But long before measurements, our stories already knew: we are walking rivers.

Every river begins in secrecy. A spring bubbles up through stone. A trickle gathers in a hollow, until a stream is born. In Irish myth, the most sacred springs were the Wells of Segais — deep pools of wisdom shaded by hazel trees. To drink from such a well was to be changed. The goddess Boann, whose name gives us the Boyne, approached that forbidden source. The hazels dropped their crimson nuts into the water, and the Salmon of Knowledge fed upon them. To drink was forbidden, yet Boann, hungry for wisdom, did not turn away. She stepped closer. As she bent to the well, its waters rose, furious and alive, surging outward. The flood followed her as she ran, breaking open the land until the river itself was formed. The Boyne was her body, her courage, her sacrifice.

Sionann too sought the Well of Segais. Granddaughter of the sea-god Manannán mac Lir, she dared to lift the waters to her lips. At once they pulled her under, and she was drowned in their force. From her body flowed the Shannon, Ireland’s great artery, winding from the midlands to the sea.

These myths are not distant curiosities. They are maps of the headwaters of our own lives. Each of us begins in water. The womb is our first river, the amniotic tide that carries us. The soft spot on an infant’s crown, the fontanelle, is like a spring — the first opening from which life emerges. Birth itself is a sudden release of waters, a flood announcing that new life is entering the stream. To emerge gasping into air is to be like a stream suddenly freed from the hill. Across cultures, water is birth. In the Ganges, Mother Ganga flows from the locks of Shiva, bringing fertility to the plains. Among the Navajo, the breaking of waters is a sacred sign. In countless traditions, baptismal waters echo this truth — immersion as a re-entry into womb and spring, a new beginning drawn from the depths. We are born of water, and we are born into water’s stories.

Once the headwaters are released, the river flows. Tributaries branch and gather, feeding its journey just as veins and arteries branch through our flesh. Wetlands filter its breath, like lungs exhaling mist. And then there are the boglands, those deep, dark organs of the earth. If wetlands are the lungs, then bogs are the liver — slow, rich, mineral, filtering, storing, healing. They do not rush or surge; they brood and distil. Their waters are heavy with iron, their mosses steeped in tannins, their depths preserving what falls into them for centuries.

In Ireland, bogs were revered for their curative powers. To place your bare feet in bog water was said to draw out sickness of every kind. The iron-rich pools were held in highest esteem for healing sores, fevers, swellings, weakness of the blood. The bog was not simply wasteland, as modern maps once called it, but a sacred pharmacy. Its slow, patient waters leached toxins from the body as surely as they filtered the land. People trusted that walking barefoot through bog, or submerging swollen limbs in its dark pools, could restore health when all else failed.

But bogs are more than healers; they are keepers of memory. Just as our bodies store unspoken experiences in tissue and bone, so the bog stores time itself. Whole forests lie buried in its layers, their trunks blackened and preserved. Ancient tools, vessels, and offerings lie waiting in the peat. Even human bodies, given to the bog in sacrifice or punishment, have been found with hair, skin, and fingernails intact after thousands of years. The bog remembers what the land forgets. It is the body’s memory made visible.

And the bog is liminal. Neither dry ground nor open water, it is the threshold between. To step into it is to be half-claimed by the earth, half-embraced by water. In myth and history, such places drew both reverence and fear. Offerings were made to the bog as to a deity — butter wrapped and lowered into its dark to preserve and to appease, treasures sunk as gifts, bodies given as covenant. To walk barefoot into a bog was to risk being drawn in, yet it was also to seek renewal, to ask the earth to drink your sickness and give back strength.

Within our own bodies, the bog is echoed in the liver and the skin — those slow-working, filtering organs that carry the task of cleansing what is heavy or harmful, and in the deep tissues where memory is stored. Just as the bog preserves what is hidden in its layers, so our bodies hold the traces of grief, trauma, and story. Sometimes what is buried surfaces suddenly, like a bog-body rising from the peat. At other times it simply remains, a quiet witness within us. To honour the bog is to honour that part of ourselves which works unseen, which holds and filters and remembers. Just as rivers are our veins, wetlands our lungs, estuaries our bowels, the bogs are our hidden depths — dark, healing, and wise.

Rapids are the river’s heartbeat — sudden surges of energy like the racing pulse of adrenaline in our veins. Waterfalls are the throat and spine, the body’s cry released with force and descent. Meanders are joints and ligaments, bending and supple, preventing fracture. Floodplains are our skin — porous, absorbent, scarred, yet endlessly capable of renewal. Estuaries are our bowels, where nutrients mingle, salt and fresh meet, feeding the wider system. The delta is the mouth, open wide, speaking itself into the sea.

When rivers are dammed, their flow is interrupted. Sediment clogs. Fish can no longer return to spawn. Floodplains dry. In the same way, when our grief is dammed, when our tears are withheld, our inner ecosystem suffers. Blood pressure rises, breath shortens, heartbeats stumble. We are not meant to be static — we are designed for movement, for ebb and swell. The Nile, lifeblood of Egypt, was long understood in this way. Its annual flood was not catastrophe but gift, renewing the soil with silt. Its waters were seen as the very circulation of the land’s body. In Aotearoa, the Whanganui River is recognised as an ancestor, legally a living being. Its tributaries are described as veins, its flow as heartbeat. To obstruct it is to wound a relative. To understand rivers as bodies is to understand ourselves more truthfully. We are not dry, fixed creatures. We are beings in constant motion, vessels of flow.

Rivers are memory-keepers. Each bend holds silt from upstream — pollen from ancient meadows, ash from long-dead fires, fragments of bone from animals that drank at its edge. A river’s floodplain is a library written in layers of sediment. In our bodies, memory flows likewise. Trauma unspoken lodges like sediment, altering the course of our inner current. Grief unshed swells, pressing against the banks of the heart. When tears fall, they are like floodwaters, washing the channel clear, returning fertility to the soil of the soul.

In Ireland, grief was often carried to water. Women keened beside rivers and wells, their wailing rising with the current. Holy wells became places of lament as much as healing — tears mingling with the spring in exchange for comfort. Even today, rags are tied to the branches above holy wells, each one a prayer of sorrow or hope entrusted to the water’s body. The Greeks spoke of the river Lethe, whose waters induced forgetting. Souls drank from it to let go of memory before rebirth. The Andean peoples of South America wept into rivers, offering their grief to the flowing current. Everywhere, water is recognised as a vessel for sorrow, a companion for the passages of loss. When we dam our grief, we cut ourselves off from renewal. When we allow tears, we honour the truth that we are rivers — meant to release, meant to overflow when needed, meant to return always to balance.

Rivers are thresholds. To cross a river is never just geography; it is transformation. In Irish tradition, the westward sea was the direction of the dead. Souls were thought to travel across water at death, ferried into the otherworld. Samhain, the year’s great threshold, is bound to mist, tides, and rivers — the thinning veil marked by watery crossings. Birth, too, is marked by water. Baptism in the Christian layer echoes this ancient truth: immersion as passage, the old life drowned so the new may rise. Washing the body at death — whether in river, well, or basin — is another rite of passage, the soul sent onward with the blessing of water.

Around the world, this pattern repeats. The Greeks knew the Styx as the boundary of death, Charon’s ferry carrying souls to the beyond. In Norse custom, the dead were sent to sea in ships, their flames rising upon the tide. Among the Māori, the departing spirit travels northward to Te Rerenga Wairua, where it leaps into the ocean to return home. In Japan, water rituals such as Mizuko kuyō honour children lost before birth, recognising water as the passage between worlds. To live is to be carried by rivers of transition. Every change, every rite of passage, is a crossing. And always, water marks the way.

Autumn is water’s season. Summer blazes with fire — quick, expansive, radiant. But autumn belongs to the tide that softens, the stream that yields, the rain that restores. Leaves fall into soil, streams swell, and the wells grow deep and dark. Water teaches release. It does not cling to the stone it passes. It does not hoard the meadow it nourishes. It carries, it lets go, it moves on. This is its wisdom — and the work asked of us in autumn.

Pilgrimages to holy wells in Ireland often involved circling sunwise, whispering prayers, leaving tokens, and then drinking or washing. To bow over water was to learn the art of release, to lay down burdens into its keeping. The well received what was too heavy to bear. Ecology affirms the same lesson. When rivers are allowed to flood naturally, they restore their floodplains, nourishing the land. When we let water move as it wills, ecosystems thrive. To try to control every flow is to court disaster. Surrender is not weakness; it is resilience. In our own lives, autumn invites us to loosen the grip, to trust the tide, to release into the wider flow.

All rivers move toward the sea. Whether rushing torrents or gentle streams, they gather, merge, dissolve into something larger. The ocean receives them all without judgement. So it is with us. Our lives are currents, carrying memory, joy, sorrow, and song. We meet others along the way — tributaries merging, flows joining — until at last we too move toward confluence. Death is not a breaking, but a return. The sea receives us as surely as it receives the rivers. In Ireland, the Boyne and Shannon both begin in hidden wells, both born of women who sought wisdom. They flow separately, yet both pour eventually into the surrounding seas. Their stories remind us that no matter the path, all waters find their way home. Science too tells us the same story — every molecule of water cycles endlessly between sea, sky, soil, and body. The water we drink today has passed through countless forms before reaching us. We are not just carried by water; we are water, flowing in the great cycle of return.

To see rivers as kin is to live differently. It changes how we walk, how we farm, how we pray. It reminds us that our bodies and the rivers are not metaphors for one another, but kinships of the same truth. We are not separate from the waters of the world. We are walking rivers, sloshing along with damp insides held by thin skin. When we weep, when we sweat, when we bleed, we are speaking the language of streams and tides. Our grief is their flood. Our joy is their shimmer. Our breath is their mist.

To listen to the river’s heartbeat is to listen to our own. And when we remember this, we begin, perhaps, to live more gently in the world — with reverence, with balance, with the wisdom of flow.

This reflection is part of 'Sanctuary of the Waters: Where Beauty Comes to Rest' , my Autumn / Water Element 2025 newsletter. The full letter will be shared shortly – you are warmly invited to join here.